James Holden

The new record by James Holden, The Inheritors, is a monstrous, 80 minutes long creation, which fully shows his fascination of primitive, modular trance, Krautroken’s motile repetitions and psychedelic synth figures, freejazz and heathen rituals. It emphasizes in a stubborn and consistent way that Holden is difficult to catch and even more difficult to maintain. A versatile, curious and headstrong artist, who is able to combine perfectionism with an improvising and deeply intuitive one-take approach.

Like many other electronic artists in these years, Holden has replaced the laptop with modular synthesizers. It is a far more physical, fallible and tangible way of creating music, where patch-cables and knots are replaced of algorithms and computerbuttons. This kind of hardware provides an entirely different resistance, where chances and machines,makes them into a fellow musical player, to entities that plays along, has personality, can be controlled or be set free. Having said that, there is not any less virtuosity connected with mastering modules than other instruments, and Holden is absolutely virtuoso.

His bright vision and superior control over his equipment results in an airy, fluid mass of electronic information, transmitted as sound waves, which floats freely around in the ether as a unruly swarm of tones of modular soundbites – and then condensed and crystallized to recognizable rhythmic and melodic structures – to burst out in its own elementary constituents again in the meeting with shrill saxophones and jarring noise. A mix-match of electronic generated music, which somehow is able to sound like something primitive and original, and connected to something deeper and fundamentally humanrhythmic substance.